It seems to me that you're falling into a misconception of assuming that sentence is saying something it actually isn't. As I see it, the misconception is twofo

It seems to me that you're falling into a misconception of assuming that sentence is saying something it actually isn't. As I see it, the misconception is twofold: 1. assuming an intent without contextualising it with the rest of the piece; 2. reading it assuming a 2019 interpretation fit events that happened in 2007. As for 1, the whole article tries to show there's more to the story than that astronaut being simply an "astronut". As for 2, we have now a distance to those events to ignore how things were being reported back then (the daily noise around the issue) — that sentence being a play with the common conception of the scandal and a hint on how the article tries to go against it (or at least complicate it further, adding many emotional layers). So my conclusion is that your assessment is not valid and thus misleading.